1. 18/09/2019: What is Political Philosophy? Normative, Realist, Existentialist

Approaches
2. 19/09/2019: Natural or Artificial Politics? Aristotelian Model and Hobbesian
Model
3. 20/09/2019: What is Arbitrary Power? The State of Nature
4. 25/09/2019: What is Legitimate Authority? Contractarians; Utilitarians; Fair
Play Principle Theorists
5. 26/09/2019: What is Liberty? Liberalism; Marxism; Communitarianism
6. 27/09/2019: What is Equality? Property and Markets in Liberal, Neoliberal and
Marxist Perspectives
7. 02/10/2019: What is Justice? Rawlsian model (and his critics)
8. 03/10/2019: Justice for everyone? Everywhere?
9. 04/10/2019: Who should govern? Plato’s Epistocracy
10. 09/10/2019: Direct and Representative Democracy
11. 10/10/2019: Sovereignty before/in/after Bodin
12. 11/10/2019: Internal sovereignty
13. 16/10/2019: External sovereignty
14. 23/10/2019: Sovereignty and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century
15. 24/10/2019: Sovereignty and Democracy in Contemporary Europe
 
  

«Since political philosophy is a branch of

philosophy, even the most provisional explanation
of what political philosophy is, cannot dispense
with an explanation, however provisional, of what
philosophy is. Philosophy, as quest for wisdom, is
quest for universal knowledge, for knowledge of the
whole. The quest would not be necessary if such
knowledge were immediately available».
Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?, «The
Journal of Politics», 3/1957, pp. 343-368: 343

 
  

«Political philosophy is the attempt truly to know both the nature

of political things and the right, or the good, political order. All
knowledge of political things implies assumptions concerning the
nature of political things, i.e., assumptions which concern not
merely the given political situation but political life or human life as
such. One cannot know anything about a war going on at a given
time without having some notion, however dim and hazy, of war as
such and its place within human life as such. One cannot see a
policeman as a policeman without having made an assumption
about law and government as such. The assumptions concerning the
nature of political things, which are implied in all knowledge of
political things, have the character of opinions. It is only when these
assumptions are made the theme of critical and coherent analysis
that a philosophic or scientific approach to politics emerges».
Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy?, «The Journal of
Politics», 3/1957, pp. 343-368: 345
 
  

«My intuitive idea of power, then, is something like

this: A has power over B to the extent that he can
get B to do something that B would not otherwise
do».
Robert A. Dahl, The concept of power, «Behavioral
Science», 2/1957, pp. 201-215: 202-203.

 
  

«We have contended in this paper that a fresh approach to the study of
power is called for, an approach based upon a recognition of the two
faces of power. Under this approach, the researcher would begin not as
does the sociologist who asks “Who rules?”, nor as does the pluralist
who asks “Does anyone have power?”, but by investigating the
particular “mobilization of bias” in the institution under scrutiny.
Then, having analyzed the dominant values, the myths and the
established political procedures and rules of the game, he would make
a careful inquiry into which persons or groups, if any, gain from the
existing bias and which, if any, are handicapped by it. Next, he would
investigate the dynamics of non decision-making; that is, he would
examine the extent to which and the manner in which the status quo
oriented persons and groups influence those community values and
those political institutions which tend to limit the scope of actual
decision-making to “safe” issues».

 
  

Peter Bachrach, Morton S. Baratz, Two Faces of Power, «The

American Political Science Review», 4/1962, pp. 947-952: 952
«Is it not the supreme and most insidious exercise of
power to prevent people, to whatever degree, from having
grievances by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and
preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the
existing order of things, either because they can see or
imagine no alternative to it, or because they see it as
natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as
divinely ordained and beneficial? To assume that the
absence of grievance equals genuine consensus is simply
to rule out the possibility of false or manipulated
consensus by definitional fiat».
 
  

Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (1974), Palgrave,

New York 2005 (2nd ed. revisited), p. 27

«In thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking

rather of its capillary forms of existence, the point where
power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches
their bodies, and inserts itself into their actions and
attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and
everyday lives. […] The mythology of the sovereign was
no longer possible once a certain kind of power was being
exercised within the social body. The sovereign then
became a fantastic personage, at once archaic and
monstrous».
 
  

Michel Foucault, Prison Talk: an Interview (1977), in C.

Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and Other Writings 1972–1977, Pantheon Books, New
York 1980, pp. 37-54: 39
Political power in four dimensions

One- Two-dimensional Three-dimensional Four-dimensional

dimensional view view view view
Authors Robert Dahl Peter Bachrach Steven Lukes Michel Foucault
and Morton Baratz
Power as 1. decision 1. decision 1. decision making 1. decision making
making making 2. agenda setting 2. agenda setting
2. agenda setting 3. preference 3. preference shaping
shaping 4. subjects shaping
Focus of - formal political - formal political - formal political - formal political arena
analysis arena arena arena - informal process
- informal process - informal process - civil society,
- civil society, especially families,
especially workplaces schools and workplaces
and public sphere
Methodological ‘counting’ of votes ethnography of the ideology critique, to genealogy and
approach and decisions in corridors of power, clarify how actors archeology of power’s
misperceive interests relations
 
  
formal decision- to clarify the agenda
making arena setting
Nature of visible partially invisible largely invisible: largely invisible: power
power power distorts shapes individual and
perceptions and collective subjects
shapes preferences

«It seemed more suitable for me to search after the effectual

truth of the matter rather than its imagined one. Many
writers have imagined republics and principalities that have
never been seen nor known to exist in reality. For there is
such a distance between how one lives and how one ought
to live, that anyone who abandons what is done for what
ought to be done achieves his downfall rather than his
preservation. A man who wishes to profess goodness at all
times will come to ruin among so many who are not good.
 
  

Therefore, it is necessary for a prince who wishes to

maintain himself to learn how not to be good, and to use
this knowledge or not to use it according to necessity».
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1514), Oxford University
Press, Oxford 2005, p. 53
«Plurality is the condition of human action because we are
all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever
the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live».
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of
Chicago Press, Chicago 1958, p. 8

 
  

«The root of the ancient estimation of politics is the

conviction that man qua man, each individual in his unique
distinctness, appears and confirms himself in speech and
action, and that these activities, despite their material futility,
possess an enduring quality of their own because they create
their own remembrance. The public realm, the space within
the world which men need in order to appear at all, is
therefore more specifically “the work of man” than is the
work of his hands or the labor of his body».
 
  

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of

Chicago Press, Chicago 1958, p. 207